In 1941, a Hachasharah program began operating in a sawmill in the nearby village of Werbkowice. It was run by the “Dror” movement, which had about 40 members, and whose secretary was Moshe Rubanchik. When Hrubieszow’s Jewish community was liquidated, in August of 1942, members of Dror tried to organize partisan resistance, but they were unsuccessful, and they were all murdered by the Gestapo.
Some teenagers from Hrubieszow fought in the Red Army and in partisan units against the Germans and their helpers in the ranks of the Polish army. We know the names of some of Hrubieszow’s Jewish underground fighters: Two Beitar members, named Yukel Brand, who stayed in the Zaglembie area during the German occupation, and Shlomo Brand, who fought with a partisan unit in Vilnius. Leon Peretz (Peretzky) and Israel Weiss participated in the Polish uprising in Warsaw in 1944. Jakov Biskowitz was 15 years old in June of 1942, when he was sent to Sobibor, where he joined the partisan units and participated in an uprising under the command of Major Alexander Pechorski, a Jewish prisoner of the Red Army.
